Text of a Speech to Conservative Future,
Given in The Old Star Public House, Westminster,
Monday the 16th February 2009by Sean Gabbsean@libertarian.co.uk

Special to L. Neil Smith’sThe Libertarian Enterprise

Note: I was invited to give this speech by Patrick Sullivan
of Conservative Future. He wanted to cause a stir, and was delighted
by the outrage I provoked. Here is a text of the speech I gave. And
here is what now seems to be the killer quote:

“Do you want a Conservative Government that will succeed? Or do you
want, in twenty years time, to watch another series of documentaries
in which today&rsqip’s Conservative leaders—looking older and baggier—will
discuss how things went wrong, and how they were pushed aside by yet
another Labour rejuvenation?”

The evidence is now in. If you want to read more, I suggest my 2007 book,
Cultural
Revolution, Culture War. This is now available in hard copy and
Kindle. If the demand is there, I may produce a new edition later this
year.
—SIG

I want to begin by praising your courage in having me here tonight
to speak to you. I am the Director of an organisation that tried hard
during the 1980s to take over the youth movement of the Conservative
Party. The Libertarian Alliance provided a home and other support for
Marc-Henri Glendenning, David Hoile and Douglas Smith, among others,
when it looked as if libertarians might do the same to the
Conservative Party as the Trotskyites nearly did to the Labour Party.
Sadly, our efforts failed. Since then, the Conservative Party has
become more watchful of people like us. It has also, I must say, made
itself progressively less worth trying to take over.

I did say that I would come here and be rude to you. But that
would be a poor thanks for your hospitality. Besides, while your
party leadership has consistently ignored my advice during the past
twelve years—and has, in consequence, been out of office during
this time—there is no point in dwelling on what might have
been. We are where we are, and I think it would be useful for me very
briefly to outline my advice to a future Conservative Government.

Now, this is not advice to the Government that looks set to be
formed within the next year or so by David Cameron. I may be wrong.
It is possible that Mr Cameron is a much cleverer and more
Machiavellian man that I have ever thought him, and that he plans to
make radical changes once in office. But I do not think he is. I
think what little he is promising to do is the very most that he will
do. In any event, he is doing nothing to acquire the mandate without
which radical change would lack legitimacy. And so this is advice
that I offer to some future government of conservatives, rather than
to any prospective Conservative Government. It may even be a
government formed by the people in this room.

My first piece of advice is to understand the nature of your
enemy. If you come into government, you will be in at least the same
position as Ramsay MacDonald, when he formed the first Labour
Government in the 1920s. He faced an Establishment that was broadly
conservative. The administration, the media, the universities, big
business—all were hostile to what it was believed he wanted to
do. The first Labour Governments were in office, but not fully in
power, as they were not accepted by the people with whom and through
whom they had to rule the country. To a lesser degree, Clement Attlee
and Harold Wilson faced the same constraints. A future Conservative
Government will find much the same.

Over the past few generations, a new Establishment or ruling class
has emerged in this country. It is a loose coalition of politicians,
bureaucrats, educators, media people and associated business
interests. These are people who derive income and status from an
enlarged and activist state. They have been turning this country into
a soft-totalitarian police state. They are not always friendly to a
Labour Government. But their natural political home is the Labour
Party. They will accept a Conservative Government on
sufferance—but only so long as it works within a system that
robs ordinary people of their wealth and their freedom. They will
never consent to what should be the Conservative strategy of bringing
about an irreversible transfer of power from the State back into the
hands or ordinary people.

A Cameron Government, as I have said, seems willing to try
coexistence with the Establishment. The Thatcher Government set out
to fight and defeat an earlier and less confident version of the
Establishment—but only on those fronts where its policies were
most resisted. It won numerous battles, but, we can now see, it lost
the war. For example, I well remember the battle over abolition of
the Greater London Council. This appeared at the time a success. But
I am not aware of one bureaucrat who lost his job at the GLC who was
not at once re-employed by one of the London Boroughs or by some
other agency of the State. And we know that Ken Livingstone was
eventually restored to power in London.

If you want to win the battle for this country, you need to take
advice from the Marxists. These are people whose ends were evil where
not impossible. But they were experts in the means to their ends.
They knew more than we have ever thought about the seizure and
retention of power. I therefore say this to you. If you ever do come
to power, and if you want to bring about the irreversible transfer of
power to ordinary people, you should take to heart what Marx said in
1871, after the failure of the Paris Commune: “the next attempt of
the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the
bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash
it, and this is the precondition for every real people’s
revolution….”

The meaning of this is that you should not try to work with the
Establishment. You should not try to jolly it along. You should not
try fighting it on narrow fronts. You must regard it as the enemy,
and you must smash it.

On the first day of your government, you should close down the
BBC. You should take it off air. You should disclaim its copyrights.
You should throw all its staff into the street. You should not try to
privatise the BBC. This would simply be to transfer the voice of your
enemy from the public to the private sector, where it might be more
effective in its opposition. You must shut it down—and shut it
down at once. You should do the same with much of the administration.
The Foreign Office, much of the Home Office, the Commission for
Racial Equality, anything to do with health and safety and planning
and child protection—I mean much of the public
sector—these should be shut down. If at the end of your first
month in power, you have not shut down half of the State, you are
failing. If you have shut down half the State, you have made a step
in the right direction, and are ready for still further cuts.

Let me emphasise that the purpose of these cuts would not be to
save money for the taxpayers or lift an immense weight of bureaucracy
from their backs—though they would do this. The purpose is to
destroy the Establishment before it can destroy you. You must tear up
the web of power and personal connections that make these people
effective as an opposition to radical change. If you do this, you
will face no more clamour than if you moved slowly and
half-heartedly. Again, I remember the campaign against the Thatcher
“cuts”. There were no cuts, except in the rate of growth of state
spending. You would never have thought this from the the torrent of
protests that rolled in from the Establishment and its clients. And
so my advice is to go ahead and make real cuts—and be prepared
to set the police on anyone who dares riot against you.

I fail to see how you would face any electoral problems with this
approach. Most Conservative voters would welcome tax cuts and a
return to freedom. As for those who lost their jobs, they do not, nor
ever will, vote Conservative.

Following from this, however, I advise you to leave large areas of
the welfare state alone. It is regrettable, but most people in this
country do like the idea of healthcare free at the point of use, and
of free education, and of pensions and unemployment benefit. These
must go in the long term. But they must be retained in the short term
to maintain electoral support. Their cost and methods of provision
should be examined. But cutting welfare provision would be
politically unwise in the early days of our revolution.

I have already spoken longer than I intended. But one more point
is worth making. This is that we need to look again at our
constitutional arrangements. The British Constitution has always been
a fancy dress ball at which ordinary people were not really welcome,
but which served to protect the life, liberty and property of
ordinary people. Some parts of this fancy dress ball continue, but
they no longer serve their old purpose. They are a fig leaf for an
increasingly grim administrative despotism. I was, until recently, a
committed monarchist. I now have to admit that the Queen has spent
the past half century breaking her Coronation Oath at every
opportunity. The only documents she has ever seemed reluctant to sign
are personal cheques. Conservatives need to remember that our
tradition extends not only through Edmund Burke to the Cavaliers, but
also through Tom Paine to Oliver Cromwell. We live in an age where it
is necessary to be radical to be conservative.

Do you want a Conservative Government that will succeed? Or do you
want, in twenty years time, to watch another series of documentaries
in which today&rsqip’s Conservative leaders—looking older and
baggier—will discuss how things went wrong, and they were
pushed aside by yet another Labour rejuvenation?

But I have now spoken quite long enough, and I am sure you have
much to say in response. I therefore thank you again for your
indulgence in having invited me and the politeness with which you
have heard me.

[A combination of silence and faint applause]

Comment 1: You accuse the Conservatives of having
ignored you for twelve years. From what you have just said, it is a
good thing you were ignored. Under David Cameron&rsqip’s leadership, we
have a Conservative Party that is now positively desired by the
people. Your advice is and would have been a recipe for permanent
opposition.

Response: I disagree. There is no positive desire
for a Conservative Government. If there were, the polls would be
showing a consistent fifty point lead or something. What we have is a
Labour Government that is so dreadful that I have trouble thinking
what could be worse.

[In a private conversation before my speech, I said that the
Labour Party had turned out to be about as bad in government as the
Green Party or the British National Party or Sinn Fein.]

There are two ways of doing politics. One is to listen to focus
groups and opinion polls, and offer the people what they claim to
want. The other is to stand up and tell them what they ought to want,
and to keep arguing until the people agree that they want it, or
until it is shown not to be worth wanting. I think I know what sort
of politicians will run the next Conservative Government. What sort
of politicians do you want to be?

Comment 2 [from an Irishman]: What you are saying
means that the country would be without protection against obvious
evils. With no child protection services, children would be abused
and murdered. Without planning controls, the countryside would soon
be covered with concrete. Without planning controls, cities like
Manchester would be far less attractive places.

I will also say, as an Irishman, that I am offended by your
reference to Oliver Cromwell, who was a murderer and tyrant. You
cannot approve of this man.

Response: You have been taken in by the
Establishment&rsqip’s propaganda. This is to insist that we live with vast
structures of oppression, or that we must accept the evils they are
alleged to curb. I say that that these structures do not curb any
evils, but instead create evils of their own. We have, for example,
seventy thousand social workers in this country. They appear to have
done a consistently rotten job at protecting the few children who
need protecting. instead, they are taking children away from
grandparents to give to strangers, and are setting the police onto
dissenting ministers who allow their children to climb onto the roof.
None of this should be surprising. The Children Act and other laws
have created a bureaucratic sausage machine that must somehow be
filled. I say let it be destroyed along with all else that is evil in
our system of government.

[What I might have said, but was too polite to
say: As for Oliver Cromwell, he was one of the greatest
Englishmen who ever lived. It is partly thanks to him that we have
just had around three centuries of freedom and political stability.
When you refer to his actions in Ireland, you are repeating Fenian
propaganda. What he did in Ireland has been exaggerated by the
enemies of England, and in any event was in keeping with the customs
of war universally admitted in his own time. If you want to throw an
offended fit every time an Englishman in London praises an English
hero to other Englishmen, you should consider moving to Dublin where
all the letter boxes have been painted a reassuring green, and your
own national sensitivities never need be offended again.]

Comment 3: All you speak about is winning and the
destruction of enemies. Yet you are willing to consider keeping the
welfare state. You are nothing but an unprincipled trouble maker.
Thank God the Conservative Party no longer has any place for people
like you.

Response: If we were facing the sort of Labour
Government we had under Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, you would
be right. However, we have an Establishment that has already given us
the beginnings of a totalitarian police state. Today, for example,
the authorities will start collecting details of every telephone
call, text and e-mail sent in this country. Children are about to
have their details stuffed into a giant database that will enable
them to be monitored by the authorities until they are
adults—and probably through their entire lives. We live in a
country where privacy is being abolished. Speech is increasingly
unfree. The police are out of control. Everything is getting rapidly
worse, and it is easy to see the end state that is desired, of total
control.

If a government of radical conservatives ever does take power, it
will have one attempt at saving this country. That means radical and
focussed actions from day one. Anything less than this, and it will
fail. I am suggesting a revolution—but this is really a
counter-revolution against what has already been proceeding for at
least one generation. If we are to beat the heirs of Marx, we must
learn from Marx himself.

Comment 4: You are wasting our time with all this
radical preaching. People do not want to hear about how they are
oppressed by the Establishment, and how this must be destroyed. What
they want to hear is that taxes are too high, that the money is being
wasted, and that there are ways to protect essential public services
with lower taxes. That is why the Taxpayers&rsqip’ Alliance has been so
much more prominent than the Libertarian Alliance. We must have
nothing to do with the ranting lunatics of the Libertarian
Alliance.

Response: You may have a desire for electoral
success that I do not share. But I am the better politician. All
debate is perceived as taking place on a spectrum that has a centre
and two extremes. If the Libertarian Alliance did not exist, the
relevant spectrum would simply reconfigure itself with the Taxpayers&rsqip’
Alliance at one extreme, and the centre would be still less
attractive than it now is. Since most people consciously take
centrist positions, it is in your interest—regardless of
whether I am right—to say what I do. It makes you and your
friends moderate in relation to me.

[At this point, some unfortunate woman began screeching that I was
a fascist, and the debate came to an end.]

[I normally like to comment on these events once I have described
them. I think, however, the above stands by itself.]

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